Brit-lit biopics, 1990–2010

Abstract

The 1990s and 2000s saw the release of a surprising number of British and American films depicting the lives of prominent British writers and focusing in some way on the process of writing.¹ We might label these films Brit-lit biopics. In fact, there have been at least sixteen such films in twenty years — that is, almost one a year, from Shadowlands (dir. Richard Attenborough, 1993) and Tom and Viv (dir. Brian Gilbert, 1994) in the early 1990s, via Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) and Iris (dir. Richard Eyre, 2001) around the turn of the century, to Miss Potter (dir. Chris Noonan, 2006) and Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion, 2009) in the late 2000s (see Table 6.1). These films covered writers as diverse as William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen and Iris Murdoch, J.M. Barrie and C.S. Lewis, Beatrix Potter and Dylan Thomas. There was also The Hours (dir. Stephen Daldry, 2002), which, though hardly a biopic, nevertheless offers scenes from the life of Virginia Woolf.